Saturday, March 12, 2016

Charlie Hebdo deserve their award for free speech whether or not they were racist

A few months after the Charlie Hebdo killings, an organization called PEN
decided to honor the slain editors and employees with the Toni
and James C. Goodale Free Expression Courage Award. Organization leaders Andrew
Solomon and Suzanne Nossel explained why in an open letter, aptly titled Why We’re Honoring Charlie Hebdo. Here’s an excerpt:

These audacious attacks
aim to terrorize a worldwide audience into silence on subjects that, though
sacred to some, affect many others and must not be above debate…Charlie Hebdo’s
staff members knew that producing satire aimed at venerated targets was
dangerous. Their valor lies in their dauntless fortitude patrolling the outer
precincts of free speech. While many question the defense of that far-flung
territory because of the bigotry that can lurk there, Charlie Hebdo has guarded
it vigilantly, keeping it open for all should a time come when we, too, may
need to challenge taboos and risk sacrilege. Without those who stake out the
border provinces, we would all be forced to dwell in an ever shrinking
expressive terrain.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself. Unfortunately,
many of PEN’s members did not agree, causing 145 of them to join in
an open letter opposing Charlie Hebdo’s receipt of the award. They wrote in
part:

"We do not believe in censoring
expression. However, there is a critical difference between staunchly
supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically
rewarding such expression… in an unequal society, equal opportunity offence
does not have an equal effect.”

I
explained in a prior post
why Charlie Hebdo was not racist by any reasonable interpretation of the word. But
for the
purposes of this blog post, let’s overlook that. Never mind that the leading French
anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this
country.” Never mind that of the 525 Charlie Hebdo covers published from
2005 to 2015, only 7 singled out Islam, while far more ridiculed
Christianity and the racism of France’s own National Front party.

I
ask you to forget all that because for the purposes of this award, it’s
irrelevant. Even racist assholes can be deserving champions of free speech.

When Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis on the door in Wittenberg, he did so
while holding a set of religious beliefs that by modern standards was pretty abhorrent. His message surely offended and perhaps
threatened many who encountered them. But when he refused to recant those
beliefs while on trial, despite being threatened with the prominent and often
enforced penalty of being burned at the stake, he did something heroic that
paved the way for 500 years of Protestant dissenters after him. In the larger
context of European history, the content of his objections to Catholicism and
the theological merit of “justification by faith alone” are largely beside the
point.

The point is, free-speech martyrdom is content
neutral. If the Westboro Baptist Church had their offices firebombed in an
attempt at their lives, and they kept protesting anyway, they too would be
doing something courageous in the face of repression. They would still be jerks
in lots of other ways, just like athletes who win MVP awards or actors who win
Oscars can still be bad people. But those who offer such awards do not, and
should not, consider perceived defects in the candidates’ character or
political beliefs when determining who meets
the criteria for the specific award in question.

When PEN gives an award for free speech, it’s
celebrating those who preserve that freedom by refusing to forfeit it in the
face of a heckler’s veto. PEN is declaring it unjust that people who wish to
speak to be silenced by the threat of violent retribution, regardless of what
it was they wished to say. Therefore, speakers who encounter threats or
even acts of violent retribution and
decide to keep speaking anyway, are standing up to that injustice and
defending PEN’s founding principles – in this case, at the cost of their lives.
That is a tremendous public service which warrants recognition. The substance
of what was said shouldn’t even come into the picture.

The cartoonists and editors at Charlie Hebdo had
nothing to personally gain from posting those pictures, and everything to lose.
They weren’t doing it for profit, they weren’t doing it for self-satisfaction.
They were doing it because they genuinely believed it was important that those
subjects be ridiculed. They latched on to what they saw as a noble cause, they
risked their lives for the sake of that cause, and they did so nonviolently – with that final word
being the critical distinction between our conception of martyrdom and that of
our Islamist enemies.

Charlie is against all
forms of authoritarian religion (Le Monde analyzed ten years of Charlie’s cover
stories and found far more attacks on Christianity than on Islam.) Indeed, it
is blasphemous. Is that not an honorable left-wing thing to be? It used to be
so, before we became so hopelessly confused about Islam: half the time we’re
reminding each other that violent fundamentalists like the ones who committed
the Charlie Hebdo murders are a tiny fraction of the world’s 1.6 billion
Muslims, who are ordinary, nonviolent people of good will, and the other half
of the time we talk as if the murderers are out to redress real wrongs—and
understandably so, even if the target is poorly chosen. Which is it? I’m not
sure that latter view serves Muslims well—it’s a bit like saying people who assassinate
abortion providers represent Christians, and West Bank settlers represent Jews.

It would be awkward for
145 alleged intellectuals to sign off on a document that made such easily
disprovable assertions as signatory Francine Prose's comment to Pollitt that
"It's a racist publication. Let's not beat about the bush," so better
to holster the race card and instead pivot to an insane new free-speech
concept:Even if you are truly equal in offending
every segment of society, you are still guilty, because some segments are worse
off than others…

Set aside the hypocrisy
for a moment, and just think about the practicality of pre-calibrating your
speech based on the comparative unequal status of the broad demographic group
that the narrow target of your satire may or may not belong to.Doesn't sound like a particularly freeing exercise, even if you (like Charlie
Hebdo did) focus primarily on people who hold power.

People who care deeply
about global free speech won't soon forget that a collection of prestigious
American authors chose the occasion of a mass murder to advocate illiberal
principles and slander the dead.

“[L]et’s
imagine, for a moment, that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists weren’t very good
guys. Surely even bad guys should be safe from fanatics with machine guns. The
crucial distinction is not between those we like and those we don’t…but between
acts of imagination and acts of violence. The imagination sees and draws and
describes many things—pornographic, erotic, satiric, and blasphemous—that are
uncomfortable or ugly. But they are not actually happening. The imagination is
a place where hypotheses and conditionals rule, and where part of the fun, and
most of the point, lies in saying the unsayable in order to test the truths of
what’s most often said. When the Charlie cartoonists made Muhammad look
foolish, they were not saying that Muslims were evil—they were questioning the
entire business of turning a person into a prophet. Not to get this is not to
get why they were cartoonists.

Their
doubters, it seems, believe that this activity of imagination was wrong or
condemnable. They believe, instead, in a kind of communal protection—that the
comfort of communities is more important than the public criticism of ideas.
It’s a legitimate thought, one with a history of its own. It just doesn’t seem
to be a thought worth inspiring a boycott by a self-defined cosmopolitan
community of writers. If literature has any social function, after all, it is
premised on the belief that, in the long run, the most comfortable community is
going to be the one that knows the most about itself. Criticism is always going
to be uncomfortable for somebody.

“The relentless campaign against Charlie Hebdo by those accusing
it of “racism” or “punching down” has had an effect. Because once deployed, as
the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo discovered, the racism charge sticks to
the accused’s skin like napalm. And no one is immune — even murdered
cartoonists — because there are no penalties for filing a false
report. So if they expected unmitigated solidarité after their staff was
machine gunned (while planning their participation, it should be noted, in an
anti-racism event), they were surely disappointed when non-Francophone writers
who hadn’t previously heard of Charlie exploded with denunciations of its
racist intent. The most profane mainstream examples compared staffers with
raping colonialists and genocidal Nazis.

…one can’t begrudge
Riss and Luz and all the other survivors at Charlie Hebdo the decision to go
soft on those who most demand mockery and derision. But we should begrudge
those in media who shrugged at the assassin’s veto, claiming they couldn’t publish
satirical cartoons out of respect for religion, for whom Je Suis Charlie was
merely social media signaling.”